Hayley Morton (Part 2)

Speaker 1
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.

Speaker 2
Welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper and I guest today is Hayley Morton, author of books for children and adults, educator, librarian and yoga teacher. Welcome to the program Hayley.

Speaker 3
Thank you.

Speaker 2
We spoke last week about your children's books, your experiences in Spain and about getting married in Spain after doing the Camino. But I want to start with what happened in 2019. In February of that year, life took a very unexpected turn for you. Would you tell us what happened?

Speaker 3
So we moved from Spain to Australia mid -2018 and early 2019, we, well late 2018, we decided that we would start trying to have a family. Now it's something I had been putting off for many years with different partners for various reasons or excuses and you know I had reached the age of 40 and we thought it was about time we'd do something about it. But I was feeling a bit guilty because I didn't just come back to Australia, back to my job and I didn't want to then say, oh sorry I'm going off on leave again. But I thought no I can't leave it any longer.

So we decided to start trying and it turned out that I had what we thought was hormonal issues. So we went to IVF clinic and they found that my prolactum was really high and as it turned out it was a rather large benign tumour at the base of my skull. It's called meningiomas so it was in the lining of the brain but it had pushed its way up around the pituitary gland and was increasing the level of prolactum that the gland produces which in turn decreases your estrogen levels and it had caused infertility.

That was an enormous shock for me. I'd always been very healthy, quite fit. I had not had any symptoms. It turns out a lot of people with this condition have a lot of varying symptoms from vision problems to severe headaches and a whole range of stuff and I'd had nothing at all till I realised that I was infertile. And the other side of it was that I had this lifelong terror, abject terror of the medical industry and not having had to use them much at all. I didn't have much experience there but this is someone who I used to faint if they took blood.

Sometimes I fainted when I had a vaccination so anything more than injections was just kind of unthinkable for me and here I am being told by a brain surgeon that you have to have surgery. And so I went through a very tough 18 months because it ended up coinciding with COVID so I was diagnosed before COVID reached Australia but our waiting list is really long in public hospitals. I had private health. I'd had it for 15 years, never used it but I was not aware of things like the GAP system and having just come back from Spain I'd used up a lot of my savings being over there and my job there I was not earning nowhere near as much as I had here.

My husband wasn't working here because he didn't have his qualifications recognised and he needed to improve his English in order to do that so I was very aware that it was my income that we were relying on and felt guilty about that as well. So I decided to go on the public waiting list and in the end with COVID and you know they got scheduled a surgery and then it got postponed and it ended up being 18 months before I had this surgery but those 18 months I experienced extreme anxiety and I'm very glad for the background that I had in yoga and to some extent meditation at that point I wasn't really a strong meditator but I have since become more so.

Since the surgery, yoga too, talk about that in a minute. Yeah so it was probably the most challenging period of my life. It took a long time to recover longer than I expected. I had the surgeon saying after three months you should be able to go back to work and I felt nowhere near ready after even four months but I tried to push myself and agreed to go back and then found out that the rest of my team were made redundant so I was made redundant too which was a blessing in disguise. And so yeah then it was the journey of okay very slowly adding things in starting to teach a bit of yoga and then adding more in and then eventually getting back to work in libraries.

For a while I couldn't write at all because part of the surgery had damaged an optical nerve and for a little while I had double vision after the surgery and then that thankfully corrected itself but my vision was still quite blurred in that one eye and the other eye was like getting tired from trying to overcompensate. That's kind of almost almost corrected itself. I've got a bit of peripheral vision loss and a little bit of blurriness. There's less light getting in on that right eye but my other eye is still perfect so overall I'm extremely fortunate in that respect.

06:02

Speaker 2
You mentioned before about being anxious about the surgery, I think any of us would be anxious if we were having brain surgery, so that takes tremendous courage and you mentioned being tired afterwards. Do you have flustering effects, of tired...

Speaker 3
I do. There's a condition, when you have a traumatic brain injury or an acquired brain injury often that includes fatigue. It's getting less and less. I'm you know able to add more and more in and I can, you know, I've worked full days now where I'm okay. I find that if I do try and pack full days into a week or two weeks then I'll have a you know mini crash and I need to take a little rest. Whereas that never used to happen to me. I was always a bit of an energiser bunny - go, go, go. But that in itself is probably a good thing because I think it's not good to be constantly on the go and that's something that yoga is supposed to teach us to kind of relax a bit more, be in the moment, not always full-pelt.

Speaker 2
Sure. And you’re also a yoga teacher. So you said before that yoga and meditation have helped with your recovery. And for our listeners, you do provide yoga classes and details of those are on your website. So what's teaching yoga like? What's that experience like?
Speaker 3
I enjoy it. You see it's, yoga has been a part of my life for a long time now. It can be challenging too, you know, like any teaching position, you know, there are its challenges as the self -doubt that sometimes creeps in, the nervousness, but you know that kind of dissipates with time as you get used to a style that you're teaching or to a group that you teach on a regular basis and yeah I really enjoy trying different things. So I've taught, you know, yin yoga which is very slow, you know, really relaxing and stretching the the connective tissues as well as your muscles and then you know the more traditional ashtanga and hatha styles for those that know something about yoga and then I've gotten into some kids yoga too which tend to do in school holidays.

Speaker 2
Wow, so what's it like teaching yoga to children who are well known for being energetic and wanting to run around? How do you get kids to sit and to slide?

Speaker 3
It depends on the day, depends on the age of the child and on the group but it's not with children it's not all about slowing down. There are moments where you use games and props to help them connect in with their breath as a way to calm down. Sounds to listen to but then the middle part of the class can be quite energetic because you know yoga is movement as well. So it's finding that balance.

Speaker 2
You also run a library story time yoga program for children called Bumble Bee Yoga. Can you tell us about that?

Speaker 3
So Bumblebee is actually an organisation, a company run by a lady called Leah. And I work for her. So we do children's yoga sometimes in school holidays. She also has a focus on yoga for people experiencing disability. So I have some private clients through that, one of whom had the same surgery I did. And same tumour, believe it or not. So we've both done some training in yoga specifically for brain injury. And then Leah has also done another training in kind of accessible yoga, therapeutic yoga therapies.

Speaker 3
So yeah, it's kind of a mixed bag there. But yes, we do run story time yoga for kids in public libraries through schools and their OSH programs. So it's using some of my books and some other books that lend themselves well to yoga and putting yoga movements with the story.

10:13

Speaker 2
Fantastic. Hey, you're a writer, an educator, a yoga teacher, and you're also, as you mentioned in last week's program, a librarian. Now some aspects of being a librarian have changed in this digital age and yet the spirit of librarianship remains the same. What do libraries mean to you and why are they such an essential part of our community?

Speaker 3
They mean equitable access to me. So no matter who you are, you should be able to have access to information to help improve your life and it's also about lifelong learning. It's not something just for when you're in school or university. It's for before you go to school and it's for in your later years too. And in public libraries these days it's not just books, there's a whole range of resources available so for those people who prefer things visual or audio, things that are electronic rather than print based, it's a whole mixture now. Anyone can access it and it's free.

Speaker 2
And it's something we've all grown up with. When I was a child anyway, and I had the advantage of having a librarian for a father, so weekends for me would often be going into the children's library and just reading to my heart's content. But in those days where television was more of a treat than an expectation or part of daily life, libraries were the places many of us went to.

Speaker 3
Yeah, I remember being in public libraries and school libraries. I was a very frequent visitor to school libraries and I spent a lot of my spare time reading as a kid. I was a real bookworm. Yeah, loved it.

Speaker 2
On Vision Australia Radio you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is Hayley Morton, author of books for children and adults, educator, librarian and yoga teacher. Hailey, your website includes a poetry page which you describe as an eclectic poetry portfolio, often tongue in cheek, exploring food, toilets, love, meditation, history and more. I have to ask about toilets because they don't feature very often in poetry collections. Would you read for us your poem Roman Toilet?

Speaker 3
Sure. Yeah, it's called Roman Toilet Propaganda...

Environmental sanitation is our great pride. Unsustainable practises we derived. Pursuing innovative excellence. Communal latrines are one example. Multiple long sturdy benches of marble. Large scale societal relief. Step up, step in, go one, go all. Old and young, large and small. Male and female. Pass the time with your closest neighbour, a public toilet experience to savor. Caring and sharing alike. A subterranean engineering feat. The galouaka massima wouldn't smell as sweet if called a common sewer main. No toilet paper for us recyclers supreme. Wet sponge on a stick's much more green. Reusable, of course.

Speaker 2
Thank you. You've done some research and spoken in interviews on the ABC about the history of toilets and toilet paper. What are some of the things that you've learnt through your research?

Speaker 3
So for those who might have not understood some of what was in that poem, the history behind it is that in ancient Rome they developed public toilets, public latrines, but they were communal for both male and female in the one room and they had these very long benches with holes at regular intervals.

Speaker 3
They had a channel of water running underneath the bench to remove your waste and it went out through their sewer main and there was another channel of water in front and they had sponges like sea, actual sea sponges on sticks that you would dip into the water and use as toilet paper because toilet paper didn't exist back then and they were shared so one person would use it, they'd leave, another person would come in and rinse the stick and use it. So a very green as I said in the poem, very green but perhaps not so sanitary. And then what else do we have? The French, the French have been involved in the history of toilets and more so in terms of bidets.

So while using water to clean yourself is not exclusive to the French or Europe and it's got a much longer history than that. The actual bidet was, well, it's agreed more or less that it was, as far as we know, was designed by the French and by 1975 it had moved very quickly over to Italy and then to Spain and in 1975 both Italy and Spain made it mandatory to have bidets in your house.

So my husband coming from Spain to Australia was very shocked and he's still not very happy about not having a bidet. We don't have room to put one in our current bathroom but we're looking at those styles, the Japanese styles that are like a seat attachment.
So yeah, we might have to get a move on and sort that out for him soon. I don't know, there's so many things to do with toilets. I have so much random information in my head.
Speaker 2
But what's interesting is, as you said at the beginning, the Roman method was very environmentally sound. The use of bidets and Japanese and other cultures that use water as a primary cleaning method are all much more environmentally sustainable than the use of toilet paper.

Speaker 3
Yeah, unless she happened to be in the middle of a drought, I guess.

Speaker 2
That's true. Hey, you're switching topics here. In your blog titled Writing Inspiration, you say that you believe everyone has at least one story in them. What advice do you give people when they say to you that they don't know how to get started with writing?

16:54

Speaker 3
Writing. Okay, so everyone has at least one story in them because it's their own story and a lot of people think it's not that interesting. I always thought that my life was not that interesting but you know people tell me otherwise and yeah I think particularly once you're gone it's a story that would be very cherished by those who knew you and those who loved you. One of my little side projects that I need to get back to is writing what I can about my grandparents, one on my mother's side and also my father's because once my parents and their brothers and sisters are gone the majority of the story of their parents will be lost as well.

So that's what I mean by everyone has at least one story in them and then advice for getting started. Maybe start with something that actually just really interests you. That's what I've always done. It's been just a little spark of something and you know just keep a piece of paper with that information on it, write a few notes and then you know leave it and come back to it later and you know sometimes you'll get ideas and be able to work on it and other times you won't and that's just part of the process but as long as it's something that interests you and if it interests you there'll be other people that are interested as well.

Speaker 2
Good point - and I'd like to follow that up with a question about when and how you write. Do you have a favourite place, a particular routine or do you write anywhere and everywhere?

Speaker 3
We have a spare room with a study desk which I do use. Sometimes I sit in the kitchen instead because it's, you know, the sun's coming in and a nice angle or I have a cat, George, who wants to be, you know, entertained at the same time and so I'll be throwing alfoil bowls at him to chase while I'm writing. So it depends - and I've written, oh my goodness, my husband is so patient with me on our honeymoon.

Second to last day I was starting to get stressed that I was working on piece of the puzzle then and one of my goals had, I said myself, was to finish that before I left Spain and I wasn't getting a lot of time to work on it while I was working, I was teaching English in an academy there and so while we're on our honeymoon I wasn't at work so I said to him, I just want to spend this like afternoon writing, writing please so I sat on the bed in our hotel and wrote and yeah, I can't believe I did that on our honeymoon but you know sometimes you just got to do what you got to do.

Speaker 2
And Hayley, your books are published by your own Haymeadow Stories. Would you tell us about what's involved in setting up and managing your own publishing company?

Speaker 3
Okay, so yeah, I decided to do that for two reasons. One, because I had seen the process in action with SA Water, because we managed that process ourselves. And secondly, it goes back to the whole self-esteem thing.

20:01

Speaker 3
I wanted to be able to prove that I could do it, and I wanted to get something out there. You know, if I waited and went through the mainstream publishing route, it may have taken a very long time, and I might have used that as an excuse to never do it. So I thought, no, just get this book out there, external to anything with SA Water. It's something that I was doing for myself. And I had a life coach at the time to help me through that process, and she had written a book and self -published it.

So, you know, there's all of the setting up of the website and deciding on what the structure of your business is going to be. You know, if you're a sole trader or you're setting it up as a company, I'd suggest sole trader to start with. It's much cheaper, less of a headache in terms of tax, because I've done both. And then there's, in terms of publishing, it's the publishing process. Now, because I'd been through that, and because I had a background in libraries, I knew about things like the international standard book numbers and how to get a barcode for it and all that kind of stuff.

And then there's courses, there's a lot of online courses you can do now, too, in creating covers, or you can hire it out now, but I prefer to do it myself if I can. A piece of the puzzle - I did get Karen, a friend to do that for me. She's a local artist. My Perfect Pet, I did myself. Just so I'd like to keep challenging myself. Yeah. Technologically, it can be very challenging and very time-consuming, but it's very rewarding. The biggest thing for me is the marketing side of it, because, you know, I just want to be writing, and I don't mind doing the technical stuff if it gets out there, but then I've got to keep pushing myself to market.

Speaker 2
We've talked last week and this about what you're working on but just to recap, bring it all together, would you go back over what you're working on at the moment?

Speaker 3
Okay, so at the moment I’m just finishing the final touches of Mima Scotta Perfecta, which is a Spanish translation of my perfect pet book for children, and I will then get back to finishing Camino Into the Heart, which is about three quarters, just over three quarters written.

Speaker 2
And that's the story of going on the Camino, but also your meeting Joaquin and then also the story of your health challenge and what came next. Yeah, yes it is. Haley, what's your website address so that listeners can find out more about your books and your personal story?

Speaker 3
It's www.haleymorton.com

Speaker 2
Thank you so much, Hayley. Our guest on Emerging Writers today was Hayley Morton, author of books for children and adults, educator, librarian, and yoga teacher. This program can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio Digital, online at varadio.org, and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes.

Speaker 1
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23:46

Speaker 2
Vision Australia Radio. Low vision. Opportunity.